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Related papers: A Boosting Approach to Reinforcement Learning

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Recent advances in reasoning domains with neural networks have primarily been enabled by a training recipe that optimizes Large Language Models, previously trained to predict the next-token in a sequence, with reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-18 Nikolaos Tsilivis , Eran Malach , Karen Ullrich , Julia Kempe

In reinforcement learning, we typically refer to unsupervised pre-training when we aim to pre-train a policy without a priori access to the task specification, i.e. rewards, to be later employed for efficient learning of downstream tasks.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Riccardo Zamboni , Mirco Mutti , Marcello Restelli

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that satisfy certain constraints before deploying them to safety-critical applications. Previous primal-dual style approaches suffer from instability issues and lack optimality…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Zuxin Liu , Zhepeng Cen , Vladislav Isenbaev , Wei Liu , Zhiwei Steven Wu , Bo Li , Ding Zhao

We study a posterior sampling approach to efficient exploration in constrained reinforcement learning. Alternatively to existing algorithms, we propose two simple algorithms that are more efficient statistically, simpler to implement and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-09 Danil Provodin , Pratik Gajane , Mykola Pechenizkiy , Maurits Kaptein

Scaling end-to-end reinforcement learning to control real robots from vision presents a series of challenges, in particular in terms of sample efficiency. Against end-to-end learning, state representation learning can help learn a compact,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-25 Antonin Raffin , Ashley Hill , René Traoré , Timothée Lesort , Natalia Díaz-Rodríguez , David Filliat

The success of Reinforcement Learning (RL) heavily relies on the ability to learn robust representations from the observations of the environment. In most cases, the representations learned purely by the reinforcement learning loss can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-12 Somjit Nath , Rushiv Arora , Samira Ebrahimi Kahou

Reinforcement learning (RL) faces substantial challenges when applied to real-life problems, primarily stemming from the scarcity of available data due to limited interactions with the environment. This limitation is exacerbated by the fact…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-04-10 Cristiano Capone , Paolo Muratore

A promising way to improve the sample efficiency of reinforcement learning is model-based methods, in which many explorations and evaluations can happen in the learned models to save real-world samples. However, when the learned model has a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-14 Haoxin Lin , Yihao Sun , Jiaji Zhang , Yang Yu

While reinforcement learning algorithms provide automated acquisition of optimal policies, practical application of such methods requires a number of design decisions, such as manually designing reward functions that not only define the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-29 Tim G. J. Rudner , Vitchyr H. Pong , Rowan McAllister , Yarin Gal , Sergey Levine

We propose an enhanced zeroth-order stochastic Frank-Wolfe framework to address constrained finite-sum optimization problems, a structure prevalent in large-scale machine-learning applications. Our method introduces a novel double variance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-24 Haishan Ye , Yinghui Huang , Hao Di , Xiangyu Chang

Multi-objective Markov decision processes are a special kind of multi-objective optimization problem that involves sequential decision making while satisfying the Markov property of stochastic processes. Multi-objective reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Sherif Abdelfattah , Kathryn Kasmarik , Jiankun Hu

This paper provides a statistical analysis of high-dimensional batch Reinforcement Learning (RL) using sparse linear function approximation. When there is a large number of candidate features, our result sheds light on the fact that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-10 Botao Hao , Yaqi Duan , Tor Lattimore , Csaba Szepesvári , Mengdi Wang

Learning near-optimal behaviour from an expert's demonstrations typically relies on the assumption that the learner knows the features that the true reward function depends on. In this paper, we study the problem of learning from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-28 Luis Haug , Sebastian Tschiatschek , Adish Singla

Policy gradient methods are powerful reinforcement learning algorithms and have been demonstrated to solve many complex tasks. However, these methods are also data-inefficient, afflicted with high variance gradient estimates, and frequently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-15 Andreas Doerr , Michael Volpp , Marc Toussaint , Sebastian Trimpe , Christian Daniel

This work proposes an efficient batch algorithm for feature selection in reinforcement learning (RL) with theoretical convergence guarantees. To mitigate the estimation bias inherent in conventional regularization schemes, the first…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Kyohei Suzuki , Konstantinos Slavakis

Existing inverse reinforcement learning methods (e.g. MaxEntIRL, $f$-IRL) search over candidate reward functions and solve a reinforcement learning problem in the inner loop. This creates a rather strange inversion where a harder problem,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-06 David Wu , Sanjiban Choudhury

We propose a soft gradient boosting framework for sequential regression that embeds a learnable linear feature transform within the boosting procedure. At each boosting iteration, we train a soft decision tree and learn a linear input…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-17 Huseyin Karaca , Suleyman Serdar Kozat

In recent times, reinforcement learning has produced baffling results when it comes to performing control tasks with highly non-linear systems. The impressive results always outweigh the potential vulnerabilities or uncertainties associated…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-11-14 Arshad Javeed

Boosting algorithms enjoy strong theoretical guarantees: when weak learners maintain positive edge, AdaBoost achieves geometric decrease of exponential loss. We study how to incorporate group fairness constraints into boosting while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Amir Asiaee , Kaveh Aryan

Reinforcement Learning has suffered from poor reward specification, and issues for reward hacking even in simple enough domains. Preference Based Reinforcement Learning attempts to solve the issue by utilizing binary feedbacks on queried…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-02-20 Mudit Verma , Subbarao Kambhampati